Honesty Policy

Honesty is Our Policy

Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting & Dedicated Servers

Many hosting companies sell Web hosting with the promise of vast server resources, but fail to be transparent about exactly how limits are being imposed on their customers. We believe this is wrong. We don’t want to trick or trap our customers through small print and legalese. We want our customers to make informed decisions, and we’ve created this document to help you understand exactly what you’re purchasing.

ServeYourSite hosting packages feature a great deal more disk space and data transfer than should be used by a single Web site on a shared server.

This is true, and it is by design. We intentionally set resource limits that customers within each tier should not be able to fill. This is because space and transfer are not necessarily the best measurements for whether a site belongs on a shared server. We’ve effectively eliminated space and transfer as qualifications for shared hosting. There are other, more important factors related to shared hosting, and they are discussed in this document.

Your hosting account limits the number of files you may store.

There are a number of ways a Web host can ensure shared hosting customers are using resources in a responsible manner. One way is to allot a certain number of file “slots”, called inodes, to each account. We try to give accounts plenty of file slots, particularly for customers who reserve more resources through larger hosting packages. When an account needs more than what’s available, it’s time to upgrade! Limiting accounts by inodes is very common in the hosting industry, but you’ll rarely hear hosts talk about it.

Your site is alloted a certain amount of processing time any given month.

For hosting customers to enjoy quality hosting at reasonable prices, their sites must “play nice” with other sites on the server. Imagine you work in an office; think of how upset your co-workers would be if you made a pot of coffee in the breakroom but kept it for yourself. With shared hosting, Web sites need to share resources so everyone is happy. When a site hogs system resources, it’s time to consider getting your very own coffee pot. If this happens, we’ll help you select the hosting environment that suits your site best.

A good Web server will only require fractions of a second of processing time to display a Web page, even when created dynamically. Most sites will use very little processing time every month to send Web pages to visitors. To put this into perspective, displaying 10,000 static pages a month might only require 5-10 minutes of total CPU time.

It’s common for sites to see usage spikes. A usage spike isn’t necessarily caused by traffic spikes. Often times it can be related to a poorly programmed script, which causes the server to work extra hard even when just a few people are visiting. When these spikes become frequent and/or scripts installed cause a server to work hard, they can be disruptive to other hosting customers.

We are prepared for usage spikes, and in most cases, they won’t a have negative impact on server performance. For those that do, we can observe and measure how much a site is stressing a server, and we’ll give as much assistance as possible to help isolate the problem so you can fix it, or we’ll help you look at hosting alternatives better suited to your site.

Web hosting space on a Web server is meant to display Web sites to an Internet audience.

This sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people will open a Web hosting account in order to use it for personal storage or for other reasons. There’s nothing wrong with having online storage; plenty of great providers exist just for this reason. But when you rent space on a production Web server, that space is for a Web site.

You wouldn’t be allowed to take up residence in a retail store, because it is zoned for commercial use. This is how the rules for using disk space in your hosting account work. Your account is zoned for display a Web site.

For the safety of our hosting customers, ServeYourSite reserves the right to suspend or terminate individual accounts at its discretion.

This is a very important right for Web hosting providers to reserve, because it allows us to prevent one account from damaging others who use the same server. For example, if a hacker were to guess your password and gain access to your site, he might install a script that allows him to send spam from your site without your knowledge. This would affect system resources and could cause the server to get blacklisted by spam databases, which would affect everyone using the server.

This is just one way in which our suspend/terminate clause allows us to serve our clients’ interests best. Suspending or terminating an account is a last-resort measure, entirely guided by a site’s individual circumstances. We will make all efforts to notify clients of issues and work with them when an issue arises.

Certain types of content may not be hosted on ServeYourSite.

Some of the content prohibited on our servers will be pretty obvious. Examples of these include child pornography, cracked/nulled software, scamming/phishing Web sites and copyrighted materials not belonging to the site owner.

Other types of unwelcome content may not seem so obvious (image hosting scripts, proxy script sites, commercial live streaming, etc.) because their contents are not obscene, offensive or illegal by nature. Typically the reason these sites cannot be hosted with us is because they are known to be resource-intensive and/or to attract visitors with malicious intent. Some types of content are suitable for dedicated servers, but not shared hosting.

Please Note: this page is not the legal documentation for ServeYourSite. The information provided above is our attempt to provide laymen’s explanations for the otherwise very technical terms used in Web hosting legal documentation. The honesty policy is based on our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Acceptable Use Policy, and all hosting customers should familiarize themselves with those three documents, as they are the official, legal documentation for ServeYourSite.